ART IN REVIEW; 'Desire'

This smart, cleanly installed photography show, put together by the artist Ernesto Pujol, is drawn from the archives of Visual AIDS, the nonprofit organization that preserves the work of artists who are living with H.I.V./AIDS or have died from it.

Mr. Pujol has opted to concentrate on images of sensuality rather than illness, and has made persuasive choices. The male body is central in the tiny, blurry, black-and-white images of Ferenc Suto, in Michael Harwood's picture of a bodybuilder tiptoeing over a kitchen stove, and in a quartet of fanciful but disturbingly self-destructive pictures by Jimmy DeSana (1950-90).

Tara Popick, Joel Wateres, Jorge Veras and Mark Morrisroe (1959-89) offer a wide range of portraiture. The body is transformed in Luna Luis Ortiz's cross-dressed self-portrait and in the close-up pictures of elaborate, allover tattoos by Bern Boyle (1951-92). The politics of illness -- social and emotional -- are explored in pieces by the Los Angeles artists Edward Lightner and Albert J. Winn; in a 1991 photo essay titled ''My Life Until Now,'' Mr. Winn combines pictures of himself at home with his lover and a text about the psychic intensities of living with disease.

The show finds a classically poised center in four photographs by Bruce Cratsley (1944-98); in one a bare torso seems to radiate light. And it concludes on a witty high note with Mr. Harwood's ''Huck, Lollipops and Pollock'' in which eye candy of various kinds (including images of sculpture by the artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt) come together.

Lightboxes placed toward the back of the gallery carry a selection of slide reproductions of work by dozens of other artists who are part of the Visual AIDS Archive Project. The display is heartbreaking and heartening. A number of these artists are dead, but their work is very much alive. Mr. Pujol's show will itself have an afterlife. It can be viewed in its entirety on the Visual AIDS Web site beginning on June 26 (www.thebody.com/visualaids).

HOLLAND COTTER

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A version of this review appears in print on June 18, 1999, on Page E00033 of the National edition with the headline: ART IN REVIEW; 'Desire'. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe